The financial markets and financial information services industry encompass a broad range of financial information ranging from basic stock quotations, bids, order, fulfillment, financial and quotations to analyst reports to detailed pricing of Treasury Bills and Callable bonds. Users of financial information can now generally be divided into three segments—Traders, Information Users and Analytics Users, although some users constitute components from one or more of these categories.
Traders utilize data from financial markets such as NASDAQ, the American Stock Exchange, the New York Stock Exchange, the Tokyo Exchange, the London Exchange, the Chicago Options Board, and similar institutions that offer the ability to buy and sell stocks, options, futures, bonds, derivatives, and other financial instruments. The need for vast quantities of information is vital for making informed decisions and executing optimal transactions
Thus given the importance of receiving this information over computer networks, an improved system and method for providing secure point-to-point solution for transparent multiplication of bandwidth over conventional communication channels is highly desirable.
For example, with the introduction of Nasdaq's next generation trading system SuperMontage, Nasdaq will offer market data users an unparalleled view into the activity, liquidity, and transparency of the Nasdaq market.
For example, currently Nasdaq provides each market participant's best-attributed quotation in each stock in which it makes a market. This system known as SuperMontage allows Nasdaq to accept multiple orders from each market participate in each stock for execution within SuperMontage. Nasdaq offers that data, with multiple levels of interest from individual market participants, through new data services.
Nasdaq provides this data on both an aggregated and a detailed basis for the top five price levels in SuperMontage. This data is currently offered through market data vendors and broker/dealer distributors via the following four entitlement packages:                QuoteView℠ Each SuperMontage participant's best bid and offer, as well as the best bid and offer available on SuperMontage.        DepthView℠ The aggregate size, by price level, of all Nasdaq market participants' attributed and unattributed quotations/orders that are in the top five price levels in SuperMontage.        PowerView℠ Bundled QuoteView and DepthView.        TotalView℠ PowerView plus all Nasdaq market participants' attributed quotations/orders that are in the top five price levels in SuperMontage, in addition to the aggregate size of all unattributed quotes/orders at each of the top five price levels.        
The NASDAQ SuperMontage trading system has been cited to be representative of trend for explosive growth in the quantity of information for all emergent and future trading and financial information distribution systems. Increases in processing power at the end user sites will allow traders, analysts, and all other interested parties to process substantially larger quantities of data in far shorter periods of time, increasing the demand substantially.
The ever increasing need for liquidity in the financials markets, coupled with the competitive pressures on reducing bid/ask spreads and instantaneous order matching/fulfillment, along the need for synchronized low latency data dissemination makes the need for the present invention ever more important. Depth of market information, required to achieve many of these goals requires orders of magnitude increases in Realtime trade information and bid/ask pricing (Best, 2nd best, . . . ).
A fundamental problem within the current art is the high cost of implementing, disseminating, and operating trading systems such as SuperMontage within the financial services industry. This is in large part due to the high bandwidth required to transfer the large quantities of data inherent in the operation of these systems. In addition the processing power required to store, transmit, route, and display the information further compounds cost and complexity.
This fundamental problem is in large part the result of utilizing multiple simultaneous T1 lines to transmit data. The data must be multiplexed into separate data streams, transmitted on separate data lines, and de-multiplexed and checked. Software solutions have high latency and cost while hardware solutions have even higher cost and complexity with somewhat lower latency. In addition the synchronization and data integrity checking require substantial cost, complexity, inherent unreliability, and latency. These and other limitations are solved by the present invention.
Further compounding this issue is a globalization and consolidation taking place amongst the various financial exchanges. The emergence of localized exchanges (ECNS-Electronic Computer Networks) coupled with the goal of 24 hour/7 day global trading will, in and of itself, drive another exponential increase in long haul international bandwidth requirements, while ECNs and other localized trading networks will similarly drive domestic bandwidth requirements. Clearly long haul links are orders of magnitude more expensive than domestic links and the value and significance of the present invention is at least proportionately more important.
Information users range from non-finance business professionals to curious stock market investors and tend to seek basic financial information and data. Analytical users on the other hand, tend to be finance professionals who require more arcane financial information and utilize sophisticated analytical tools to manipulate and analyze data (e.g. for writing option contracts).
Historically, proprietary systems, such as Thomson, Bloomberg, Reuters and Bridge Information, have been the primary electronic source for financial information to both the informational and analytical users. These closed systems required dedicated telecommunications lines and often product-specific hardware and software. The most typical installations are land-based networking solutions such as T1, or ISDN, and satellite-based “wireless” solutions at speeds of 384 kbps.
Latency of financial data is critical to the execution of financial transactions. Indeed the more timely receipt of financial data from various sources including the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange, National Association of Securities Dealers (NASDAQ), Options Exchange, Commodities Exchanges, and Futures presents a fundamental advantage to those who trade. Latency is induced by the long time taken transmit and receive uncompressed data or to compress and encrypt data prior to transmission, along with the associated time to decrypt and decompress. Often current methods of encryption and compression take as much or substantially more time than the actual time to transmit the uncompressed, unencrypted data. Thus another problem within the current art is the latency induced by the act of encryption, compression, decryption, and decompression. The present invention overcomes this limitation within the current art.
Modern data compression algorithms suffer from poor compression, high latency, or both. Within the present art algorithms such as Lempel-Ziv, modified/embellished Lempel-Ziv, Binary Arithmetic, and Huffman coding are essentially generic algorithm having a varied effectiveness on different data types. Also small increases in compression to the negentropy limit of the data generally require exponentially greater periods of time and substantially higher latency. Negentropy is herein defined as the information content within a given piece of data. Generic algorithms are currently utilized as data types and content format is constantly changed within the financial industry. Many changes are gradual however there are also abrupt changes, such as the recent switch to decimalization to reduce granularity that has imposed substantial requirements on data transmission bandwidth infrastructure within the financial industry. Thus another problem within the current art is the high latency and poor compression due to the use of generic data compression algorithms on financial data and news feeds. This limitation is also overcome by the present invention.
Within the financial and news feeds, data is often segregated into packets for transmission. Further, in inquiry-response type systems, as found in many financial research systems, the size of request packets and also response packets is quite small. As such, response servers often wait for long periods of time (for example 500 msec) to aggregate data packets prior to transmission back to the inquirer. By aggregating the data, and then applying compression, somewhat higher compression ratios are often achieved. This then translates to lower data communications costs or more customers served for a given amount of available communications bandwidth. Thus another problem within the current art is the substantial latency caused by aggregating data packets due to poor data compression efficiency and packet overhead. This limitation is also solved by the present invention.
Another problem within the current art is the need for data redundancy. Currently many trading systems utilize two independent links to compare data to verify integrity. Second, the bandwidth of discrete last mile links, typically T1s, is limited to 1.5 Megabits/second.
Increases in bandwidth beyond this point require complex protocols to fuse data from multiple links, adding cost and complexity, while also increasing latency and inherent data error rates. This limitation is also solved by the present invention.
Another limitation within the current art is that nearly all financial institutions use one or more T1 lines to transfer information to and from their customers. While the costs of bandwidth have moderately decreased over recent years this trend is slowing and the need forever increased bandwidth will substantively overshadow any future reductions. Indeed with the recent fall-out of the telecommunications companies the data communications price wars will end and we could easily see an increase in the cost of bandwidth. US Domestic T1 lines currently range from several hundred dollars to upwards of a thousand dollars per link, dependent upon quantity of T1 lines purchased, geographic location, length of connection, and quality/conditioning of line. Fractional T1 lines may also be purchased in 64 Kilobit/second increments with some cost savings.
A standard T1 line transmits data at a rate of 1.544 megabits per second. Accounting for framing and data transmission overhead this means that a T1 line is capable of transmitting a 150 Kilobytes per second. While 30× faster than a modem line (which provides only 5 kilobytes per second), both are relatively slow in relation to any reasonable level of information flow. For example, transferring the contents of data on a single CDROM would take well over an hour!
Thus it is likely that the capacity of many existing T1 lines will be exceeded in the near future. For our current example let's assume that we need to double the capacity of a T1 line. Normally this is done by adding a second T1 line and combining the contents of both with Multi-Link Point to Point Protocol (MLPP) or another relatively complex protocol. Within the current art this is neither necessary nor desirable. In fact any increase over the current limitation of a T1 line results in the addition of a second line. This limitation is overcome by the present invention.
Another limitation with the current art is the extraordinary bandwidth required for real-time (hot) co-location processing which has been dramatically increased as a result of the acts of terror committed against the United States of America on Sep. 11, 2001. In order for the redundancy of any co-location to be effective, it must be resident in a geographically disparate location; this could be a different state, a different coast, or even a different country. The trend towards globalization will further compound the need for the ability to simultaneously process transactions at geographically diverse co-locations.
It is a widely known fact within the financial industry that the overall throughput of transactions is governed by the bandwidth and latency of the co-location data link, along with delays associated with synchronization, i.e. the transaction must be complete at both locations and each location must know that the other location is complete before the transaction is finalized.
High bandwidth links such as T3's are often utilized as part of this backbone structure. A single T3 line has the bandwidth of Twenty-Eight T1 lines (28×1.544=43.232 megabits/second). Thus, in the best case, a T3 line is capable of transmitting 5.4 megabytes/second. By way of comparison, the contents of a single CDROM may be transferred in approximately two minutes with a T3 link. As stated earlier, a single T1 line would take over an hour to transmit the same quantity of data.
The volume of real-time data that is required to operate any major financial institution is staggering by comparison. To deal with this issue only critical account and transaction information is currently processed by co-locations in real-time. In fact, many institutions use batch mode processing where the transactions are only repeated “backed up” at the co-locations some time period later, up to 15 minutes or longer. The limitation of highly significant bandwidth and/or long delays with co-location processing and long latency times is solved by the present invention.
Thus given the importance of receiving financial information over computer networks, an improved system and method for providing secure point-to-point solution for transparent multiplication of bandwidth over conventional communication channels is highly desirable.
As previously stated, these and other limitations within the current art are solved by the present invention.